Chocolate Cherry Chai Read online

  “I didn’t really pick that one.”

  “The King of Spades is one of the best cards you can draw.”

  “In that case … ” I leaned forward to hear Lulu over the night noises. A woman was beating a blanket over a nearby balcony, and decades-old music was beginning to spill from the bars.

  Lulu faced the king upwards. Two sets of swirly king beards stared back at me.

  “Seems you know more about your own future than I can tell you. What have you been hiding?”

  “What?” I laughed despite her seriousness. “I have no boyfriend. We broke up just before I came … ”

  “Yes, yes, yes. You’ve told me,” she hissed, cutting me off. “This card says it’s someone you already know.”

  Suddenly I felt hot. “Not an ex!” I had come to the Philippines to avoid dealing with the past, but here I was, thinking of him.

  Elias and I had met on one of those Tokyo summer nights when it was so humid it looked like you had brushed your body with coconut oil. On a whim, I decided to go to a salsa club alone and he asked me to dance. Elias knew how to bachata, and held a strong frame while we moved around the floor, slick in places from spilled margaritas. He showed me Tokyo on his motorcycle, using back roads covered in cobblestone to point out secret pockets of the fashion district. Later, he took me to Bali. He convinced everyone, from club deejays to beach restaurant owners, to play a salsa CD he always kept on hand. We danced like we were creating scenes to our own movie.

  “Definitely. Not. Ex.” I slammed the doll on the ground beside me in time with the words. Our last date ended with mascara-drenched napkins and chopstick wrappers folded into mini accordions. The sushi restaurant was exactly the kind of place Elias detested, with its plastic bucket stools and items rolling by, one by one, on a motorized food treadmill. “Canadian girls,” he said in his Spanish accent, “live on a cloud.”

  Lulu nodded, looking strangely prophetic, “Maybe not ex. Maybe friend.”

  I screwed up my face. My only real guy friend was Matt from back home, but I couldn’t imagine marrying a guy who played Dungeons and Dragons and owned multiple copies of The Communist Manifesto. The last I heard he was doing his master’s degree in sociology while dodging activism-related arrests. I’d had my taste of dancing and diving. I wasn’t about to settle for a dungeon master.

  “Perhaps the King of Spades means I have brushed past my soul mate at an airport or on an elevator.”

  “Maybe,” Lulu said, looking unconvinced. When she bent to gather her belongings, I shook my head. I’d come to the Philippines for fun, and where had I ended up? On the dusty stoop of a dive shop having my cards read “on the matters of love.” How many shades of pathetic was my big adventure made up of, anyways?

  A yellow dirt bike pulled up and the rider jumped off, revealing a mess of blonde-grey curls. “Having your fortune read on my steps?” Blue winked, causing his walnut skin to crinkle. “Though I shouldn’t joke. I was a bachelor for forty-eight years and then I married Dolly, just like Lulu said I would.”

  “Let me guess,” I shouted over his revving motor, “you got the Queen of Spades.”

  “No, that is a bad card!” Lulu jabbed me. I slid away from her.

  Blue looked at us like we’d been drinking too much lambanog — coconut-infused Filipino moonshine. “We are all going into town tonight. Dolly is already there waiting. A crew of NGO workers just landed on the island.”

  I dusted off my short shorts. “I have to wake up early.”

  Blue fiddled with the handlebars of his bike. “It’s an awesome gathering at a tiki bar with all these gnarly fire torches. I ain’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. Who comes to the Philippines to act like a grandmother?” He tossed me a shell helmet plastered with diving logos.

  “Say hello to Dolly for me!” Lulu shouted, pushing me up and off the steps. “Here, keep this,” she added, reaching for my hand with the King of Spades.

  “I can’t break up your deck,” I protested.

  She jammed the crumpled king into the doll’s belly. “It’s meant for you,” she said, stepping away.

  I got on the back of Blue’s bike and buckled the helmet. Tiny pebbles spit from under the tires.

  “Have you ever even gone into town?” Blue asked.

  “No,” I said feebly, my voice getting lost on the air.

  “Oh, brother,” Blue laughed. “Next time you ride with me you’re gonna have to wear runners, not sandals. You’re gonna feel those rocks when we hit the road!”

  The bike jerked back and forth roughly, rocking like one of those dime machine motorcycles parked in front of supermarkets. Suddenly, the bike flew forward, and the villiage blurred into smudges on either side of me. On my right, startled chickens jumped up and we tunnelled through a wall of scattered white feathers. On my left, three boys waved at the motorcycle, chasing us as far as their little legs would take them.

  The wind forced the fertility doll’s belly open. Gutted, she screamed at the night sky. The King of Spades, with his maniacally calm expression, spiralled out into the air. Carried ahead by the wind, it landed on a pile of rocks, illuminated for a sliver of a second by the bike’s lone headlight. I hung on tightly to both the doll and Blue’s waist. For the first time since I had come to the Philippines, I was not mulling about my past. And I was not worried the future wouldn’t come together the way I wanted it to. For once, I was in the now, both feet planted firmly on a flying motorcycle.

  2

  I RUSHED DOWN THE narrow, cobblestoned streets leading out from my apartment. I had mastered keeping my pin-thin heels from slipping into the crevices between the rocks, but I understood now why the geisha in old Japan wore chunky wooden shoes. Already the izakaya were crowded with hostesses and drunken salary men filling their bellies with endangered fish and local sake. I ran to catch the bright orange Chuo train to Shinjuku Station, where I transferred to the Oedo line.

  In Roppongi, I checked my phone. The text from Nico said Choco Cup was next to the multi-level Velfarre disco. Almost there.

  This was the Tokyo I’d been swept up in: an exclusive opening for another themed lounge in the club district. Before Choco Club it was Night Light. Before that, Xerox. Vodka bars with ice walls. Secret jazz clubs hidden in freight warehouses.

  The news that Elias and I were no longer a couple had spread through our friend group, yet when I got back to Tokyo from the Philippines, the invitations to parties and clubs kept pouring in. The first time I danced with Nico and his Swiss and Norwegian friends, who cheered the deejay playing trance next to us, I thought I would feel stupidly misplaced without Elias by my side. But I hadn’t. Elias was away in Spain and I was on the guest list, and there was no one to tell me not to have another glitter apple martini.

  “Maya!” Nico called out, waving at me from down the street. Like all of Elias’s friends, he looked part Viking, part model. “Took you long enough.” He put his massive hands on my shoulders and led me past the cigarette and hot soup vending machines toward the lounge.

  Inside, European house music played on deafening volume. Cold air blasted me, a relief after the muggy outdoors. Everyone looked ghostly pale and unanimously disinterested in their surroundings. A Japanese waiter in a brown tuxedo intercepted me with a tray of chocolate wafers topped with fruit, cheese, and cream.

  “Just feel at home,” Nico said, setting a mocha martini on the high bar table in front of me.

  “Even the glasses and spoons are edible … ” I heard someone say, though no one was eating anything.

  These days, I was always hungry. I just couldn’t seem to get my fill. In Japan, the men ate a lot, but the women seemed to eat so little, and when they did, it was things like strawberry and whipped cream sandwiches. Did food really need to be gendered?

  The people in the lounge swayed with the music. My gold-sequined, string-backed top, which I had purch
ased from an old man at a stall in Jaipur, shimmered under the strobe lights.

  That’s when I saw him. Elias. He was walking straight toward me. I bit my lip and tasted vanilla gloss. I hadn’t been expecting to see him but I suppose I’d been hoping to all the same. A cool draft rippled over me and I shivered.

  Even under the purple lights of the lounge I could see his lip twitch as he saw me. Motorcycle helmet clutched under one arm, his dyed hair glowing pink in the club, he took a sudden detour. Behind him was a girl holding the motorcycle helmet I used to wear. It probably still smelled of my blue rose and vanilla perfume.

  I recognized her. She frequented the same salsa clubs I went to. She could have been a relative of Nico, tall with icy blonde hair — probably in Tokyo on a modelling contract. She looked up, gave me a friendly wave, then grabbed Elias’s hand like it had always been hers to hold.

  “Well,” said Nico from behind me, cutting into my thoughts. “You came so late and we’re already done with this place. We are going to Matsuya. Everyone’s hungry.” He handed me a small box filled with dark chocolate truffles, a parting gift for the club’s grand opening.

  “Wait … I’ll come, too.” I followed Nico and his friends back into the humid night. At the local curry joint, they dropped coins into a vending machine and presented the cook behind the u-shaped glass with their tickets for beef bowl. The cook gave them a deep bow, as if he’d been handed a treasured sword and not a curry order.

  I opened the gift box and popped a powdered truffle into my mouth. Cocoa melted slowly on my tongue. My friends-on-loan were rubbing their wooden chopsticks together. I saw them exchange glances.

  “Our apologies, Maya,” said Nico, in his vague accent. He sounded like he was reading from a card wedged deep in the middle of a funeral bouquet.

  “Why apologies? Do you mean the girl with Elias?” I was about to explain how little I cared, when Nico broke in.

  “You know we love hanging out with you. You brighten up our events. It’s just that Elias is uncomfortable with seeing you after all, so … ”

  “Oh. Of course.” I dusted chocolate residue from my fingers. “No, no, I mean, you knew him first.” I stood up quickly, ankles wobbling on my stilettos. “It’s … it’s getting late,” I found myself stammering. “I’ll see you guys around,” I said, even though I knew I wouldn’t.

  I ran four blocks to the station, by some miracle making the last train, and squished myself between tail-end commuters. For once, I was thankful for the crowd, they kept me from toppling — I didn’t have the strength to pick myself up off the dirty floor of the Tokyo express train. Shifting from foot to foot in my too-high heels, I watched the bright lights of love hotels and cigarette billboards flash by in the night. Dumped again.

  At last I came to the alley that stopped dead at my apartment building. For the last four years I had been living here, at a guest house, like a permanent tourist. I clicked on the light in the shared kitchen, exposing the blue and green dragons painted on the walls. Their red eyes followed me as I reached for the milk crate in which I stored my kitchen things.

  I put a pot of water on the stove, adding a bag of orange pekoe tea. I took out the cardamom pods and, same as my mother did, pierced them with my eye teeth to release their fragrant spice. I reached for the other ingredients, knowing what I needed without thinking: a handful of fennel seeds, a stick of cinnamon, a few smashed cloves, a teaspoon of sugar, and a dash of pepper. When the liquid boiled, I stole some milk from the fridge and poured it into the pot.

  All too quickly a thick layer of burnt skin formed on the tea. Tan-coloured liquid bubbled over onto the stove. Specks of fennel and cloves sizzled on the elements. I pulled the pot away quickly and a hot splash jumped onto my skin. I yelped, watching my wrist turn red.

  On a cooling plate, the rolling chai settled down. Transfixed by the spices rising to the surface, I poured the tea into a cup.

  In my room, I held the hot cup to my lips, taking in the fiery, sweet liquid. The tea wasn’t perfect, it tasted like burnt caramel, but tonight it would have to do. I turned on a Japanese game show, watching as contestants bounced into pools of icky green goo while giant emoticons reacted on the screen. The bluish light of the television made the surface of the tea glow, like a sorcerer’s magical cup of fire. I closed my eyes. If they had been open, they would have looked like fire balls themselves, yellow and alive. Just like my mother’s. Just like her mother’s before her.

  NINA

  WHEN I WAS A child, our family used to walk to the grassy plains bordering Jinga Road to catch grasshoppers. But before Deddy could pluck their wings and Mummy could deep-fry them, we had to suffer the long walk home. Our stomachs rumbled when we smelled the roasted karanga the street vendors sold, crunchy, salty, and scalding hot. After the peanuts, we had to ignore the mogo vendors, selling their fried cassava with chili and fresh lime. We would dig our fingers into Mummy’s frock until she almost gave in. But then Deddy would say no and we would force ourselves onward, bony shoulders pressed against bony shoulders, our bodies covered in ginger-coloured dust.

  Mummy held the small bundle that was Baby Faiyaz, while Mook-Mook threw pebbles at our shoes. As we walked, we looked up at the big bungalows guarded by the watchmen. This was where the other Indians lived: the wealthy Indians, the well-fed Indians. We two girls, Anisa and me, would gawk at the manor ladies. They looked like colourful birds, with the sequins from their imported shawls shimmering in the sun. One day, would we too cut our hair short and streak it gold to match the jewellery dripping from our bodies?

  Our home, around the bend from the shanty shacks behind a hill of garbage and discarded rubber tires, was in the sakathi, the compound for the poor. The walls were cracked and the windows had bars on them. Every day a man came to clean the giant pitted hole that was our toilet. He hosed away the filth before the maggots had a chance to hatch. Many times, Mummy stood on the edge of the street, her long dress flapping wildly, shouting to see who was available to be her helper for the day.

  Anisa and I often played at being Mummy. We would slip into her long pacherri frocks, the kind only the married women wore, and pretend to make matoki, throwing imaginary plantains, green chili peppers, and crushed peanuts into a steel pot. I would lift Baby Faiyaz from his cradle, kissing his satin-soft black hairs like I alone was his Mummy. I would wrap him tightly in blankets, like a kebab nestled in a roti. When evening came, reluctantly I returned Baby Faiyaz to Mummy, and we would all pile up in Deddy’s rusty car to drive to India Street.

  At the ration store worked a man who had red, tobacco-stained teeth. He slapped the wrists of children brave enough to jump up and touch the foil-wrapped candies hanging from the ceiling like Eid celebration tinsel. His scarlet tongue darted out of his mouth as he licked the tip of his pen to record our udaar in his thick accounting book.

  That was before the raids and curfews, before military troops snaked up and down the distant hills. Before Jinga Road filled with corpses, stacked one upon the other like bricks, building the foundation of a morose bungalow.

  We drove to India Street less often after that. Baby Faiyaz no longer sat on Mummy’s lap in the front. Now nearly as tall as Deddy, he squished into the back alongside Anisa, Mummy, and me. As the eldest son, Mook-Mook sat in the passenger seat next to Deddy. In town, Anisa and I went in search of jewellery and lovely peacock-patterned saris for our next Eid celebration. We stacked bridal bangles right up to our elbows, the shiny dust remaining on our arms for hours afterward. We imagined our own wedding day: arms decorated with mehndi so elaborate it would look like we were wearing henna-laced gloves. Mummy serving black chickpeas with thick spicy sauce. Deddy fighting back tears at the thought of us leaving home.

  Going to the ration store and even to work became more and more dangerous. Mummy reminded us every day that people disappeared from the streets, and she took to treating us like small children again, rec
ording our every move.

  Many of the shopkeepers deserted India Street, but the ration store man stayed on. Strings of candies still dangled from the top of the hut, twinkling in the late afternoon sun. I stood to the side of the counter, swatting flies away while he talked to one of his customers. I had snuck to the store after my shift at the hospital to buy pantyhose. I wanted to look like all the other nurses, with their shiny, plastic mannequin legs.

  A few men lingered on the edges of the conversation, listening as if they were sitting at a tea house, not standing amidst debris and heavy traffic.

  “Killing is hard work,” the ration store man said in Gujarati, the language of our fellow Indians. Around us, the Africans spoke Swahili.

  The years had turned the ration store man’s eyes yellow; they glowed like turmeric powder. “You have to do it an orderly fashion, or there will be chaos.”

  “This is true,” said one of the men, spitting tobacco juice onto the pavement. “The president reuses bullets. He uses sledgehammers instead of swords. This way he doesn’t have to sharpen the instruments. These are all ways that make the killing more efficient, nah?”

  “The president is everywhere. He is the air that we breathe and he is in the bed that we sleep in,” another customer shouted over the honking car horns.

  I distracted myself from my impatience by thinking about the hair the ration store man kept in plastic bags under the counter. All the actresses thickened their beehives with such pieces — at least that had been the style before the theatres were closed. Before the drills, we used to watch Indian movies at the drive-in theatre, oohing and ahhing at the beautiful actresses in crepe-thin chiffon saris, dancing atop snowy mountains. Not for the first time, I wished we lived in India so I could learn dances like kathak, garba, and dandiya raas.

  “Aré!” scoffed the ration store merchant. “President Amin said he had a vision from God telling him Uganda is his. Now we Indians have to give up our homes, property, and businesses.”